One question for ur dev team

One statement I’ve seen over and over on these forums and elsewhere are proposals for “easy” fixes and overarching assumptions about how long implementation for a variety of changes “should” take.

The reality is, game development is a hugely iterative and time-consuming process, with many people involved along the way. Design takes time, Coding takes time, art takes time, QA takes time: you name it. There are also multiple steps in the pipeline for each and every proposed change and bug fix, no matter how minor, and what issues are being worked on in what order and by who can and do change as new matters arise. Sometimes extra testing is also needed for bugs that come back broken and need to be retested, because we didn't want them to go live with a bad fix.

While there may indeed be a list of known issues and bugs that run alongside some patches, for every one you are aware of, there can be dozens or hundreds being worked on behind-the-scenes that you likely never be aware of. We do things just as quickly as we can, but even then, it’s a process that takes time.

OHHH PLEASE Vaeflare, you're kidding right? Are you a programmer? Please don't take us for fools, it's like trying to teach the law to a lawyer. I myself am a programmer and I'm sure there's ALOT of IT, programmers and geeks here. I agree completely with OP. There are some points you(Vaeflare) mentionned that can be true, but for a big company like Blizz, it's less acceptable. A competent team would take less time and effort, but I rather think it's not the case here.

One statement I’ve seen over and over on these forums and elsewhere are proposals for “easy” fixes and overarching assumptions about how long implementation for a variety of changes “should” take.

The reality is, game development is a hugely iterative and time-consuming process, with many people involved along the way. Design takes time, Coding takes time, art takes time, QA takes time: you name it. There are also multiple steps in the pipeline for each and every proposed change and bug fix, no matter how minor, and what issues are being worked on in what order and by who can and do change as new matters arise. Sometimes extra testing is also needed for bugs that come back broken and need to be retested, because we didn't want them to go live with a bad fix.

While there may indeed be a list of known issues and bugs that run alongside some patches, for every one you are aware of, there can be dozens or hundreds being worked on behind-the-scenes that you likely never be aware of. We do things just as quickly as we can, but even then, it’s a process that takes time.

RIOT games says you're doing it incredibly slowly regardless the excuses and would like a word with you.

One statement I’ve seen over and over on these forums and elsewhere are proposals for “easy” fixes and overarching assumptions about how long implementation for a variety of changes “should” take.

The reality is, game development is a hugely iterative and time-consuming process, with many people involved along the way. Design takes time, Coding takes time, art takes time, QA takes time: you name it. There are also multiple steps in the pipeline for each and every proposed change and bug fix, no matter how minor, and what issues are being worked on in what order and by who can and do change as new matters arise. Sometimes extra testing is also needed for bugs that come back broken and need to be retested, because we didn't want them to go live with a bad fix.

While there may indeed be a list of known issues and bugs that run alongside some patches, for every one you are aware of, there can be dozens or hundreds being worked on behind-the-scenes that you likely never be aware of. We do things just as quickly as we can, but even then, it’s a process that takes time.

Awesome. Now....could you explain theoretical astrophysics to a spider monkey?

Many of the people here don't get it. It's a waste of time, though I appreciate your efforts.This is the instant gratification, self-entitled generation.

RIOT games says you're doing it incredibly slowly regardless the excuses and would like a word with you.

Are you dense? League of Legends is incredibly unbalanced for a PVP only game, there are tons of Bugs and they do changes almost every week(Nerfs and Buffs) because they don't know what the heck they are doing. . . and the reason they need to do this is because it is a Free to Play game and they need to please their players for them to buy Riot points which is their main source for income. And have you seen how far worse the LOL community is? Even worse than this cesspool for trolls of a Forums that Diablo 3 has, ROFL!

Anyway, there are a lot of jerks in these forums especially on this thread who thinks they are self entitled to whatever everything they want, thing is Diablo 3 was a one time purchase, other companies would have left it in the dust after it's sales, but Blizzard still continues to improve it despite it's flaws, it is still a great game whatsoever.

All these wannabe game developers on this thread talking about how easy it is to make and develop games, tell you what "Why don't you make your own game like the developers of POE are doing?". Tell us how you are doing after you've properly coded, animated and finished your game okay? If you even finish or make one. . . what's that? Yes I thought so, you can't do it, so maybe you guys should shut up right!?

P.S.I don't agree with every decision the development team has made in the past or are making in the future, and some are horribly wrong, *cough* Marquise Gems *cough*. . . but I live in reality, and I know things aren't that easily done, so to those people who think's it's freakishly easy you're either 12 year old snot nosed brat or a delusional self-entitled douche bag.

One statement I’ve seen over and over on these forums and elsewhere are proposals for “easy” fixes and overarching assumptions about how long implementation for a variety of changes “should” take.

Please tell me this is a joke.

Now while I don't recall ever suggesting any changes that I've specifically said are 'easy', I do think some of the changes I've suggested are, in fact, easy.

1. Digit dividers in the AH: 1,000,000,000 instead of 1000000000

2. Remove the 24% movespeed limit stack on items.

3. Allow players to set item filters. I don't want to see white items drop; I should be able to filter them. I don't want to see blue or yellow items below iLvl 62 drop; I should be able to filter them.

4. Gold and health globe pickup radius should be expanded to potions, tomes, and gems. Too much picking up garbage - it breaks progress.

5. Give half paragon stack bonuses to other characters from the character that has the highest paragon level. Currently there is zero incentive to play more than one character and that needs to change.

6. Allow us to hide quest dialog on Inferno. I can't stand Leah or Tyrial's garbage.

7. Ability to sell items without going back to town. Remember Blizzard, we don't want to break progress/fun. (not as easy perhaps, but still fairly easy)

8. Identify all items or identify on pickup or auto-identify upon returning to town.

9. I want to be able to keybind what the Ctrl key does (quick peek at items on the ground) to the middle-click mouse button. If I'm eating with one hand and playing Diablo 3 with the other hand, I have to keep putting my food down to hold in Ctrl. Not cool.

-

I dare you Blizzard, to have a look at these changes. They are easy. Many of them are simple number changes. I used to play around with code though, so perhaps I can't be thrown together with the ignorant masses.

One statement I’ve seen over and over on these forums and elsewhere are proposals for “easy” fixes and overarching assumptions about how long implementation for a variety of changes “should” take.

The reality is, game development is a hugely iterative and time-consuming process, with many people involved along the way. Design takes time, Coding takes time, art takes time, QA takes time: you name it. There are also multiple steps in the pipeline for each and every proposed change and bug fix, no matter how minor, and what issues are being worked on in what order and by who can and do change as new matters arise. Sometimes extra testing is also needed for bugs that come back broken and need to be retested, because we didn't want them to go live with a bad fix.

While there may indeed be a list of known issues and bugs that run alongside some patches, for every one you are aware of, there can be dozens or hundreds being worked on behind-the-scenes that you likely never be aware of. We do things just as quickly as we can, but even then, it’s a process that takes time.

OHHH PLEASE Vaeflare, you're kidding right? Are you a programmer? Please don't take us for fools, it's like trying to teach the law to a lawyer. I myself am a programmer and I'm sure there's ALOT of IT, programmers and geeks here. I agree completely with OP. There are some points you(Vaeflare) mentionned that can be true, but for a big company like Blizz, it's less acceptable. A competent team would take less time and effort, but I rather think it's not the case here.

oh please, I am a programmer/sysadmin/developer and I do understand their point of view. for such large scale game, d3 is more akin to making a movie, where every scene goes through a whole cast of people, production, post production, localisation, qa, distribution etc.

until you guys actually are involved in the gaming dev world with a large scale production for a mmo type world (ie: thousands of servers involved with load balancing, multi million transactions per second), you really have no real experience in the scale involved.

eg: i see many people saying: "Some famous streamer" should be game dev of d3., so he should go apply. until you realise that (a) he probably doesn't have any of the broad credentials or broad experience. its like asking an actor to straight off become a movie director/producer and go direct/produce avatar in 3d

Yeah, looks like Vaeflare and Grimiku have been reassigned to be Diablo all the time and have changed their avatars to reflect such... Now, I'd like to know whatever happened to our favorite fallen shaman?

One statement I’ve seen over and over on these forums and elsewhere are proposals for “easy” fixes and overarching assumptions about how long implementation for a variety of changes “should” take.

The reality is, game development is a hugely iterative and time-consuming process, with many people involved along the way.

A typical day of a Blizzard employee:9:00 - 9:30 - Send development tasks to developers in India.9:30 - 17:00 - spend time drinking coffee on meeting and talking about how opinion of clients is important.17:00 - 17:30 - Receive a daily report from indian developers. No need to test, players will do this on PTR.

One statement I’ve seen over and over on these forums and elsewhere are proposals for “easy” fixes and overarching assumptions about how long implementation for a variety of changes “should” take.

The reality is, game development is a hugely iterative and time-consuming process, with many people involved along the way.

A typical day of a Blizzard employee:9:00 - 9:30 - Send development tasks to developers in India.9:30 - 17:00 - spend time drinking coffee on meeting and talking about how opinion of clients is important.17:00 - 17:30 - Receive a daily report from indian developers. No need to test, players will do this on PTR.

LOL nailed it. That's exactly why development has been so slow and we see all the effort being dumped into crap that doesn't matter. What does some Indian programmer making 5$ an hour care about customer feedback?

One statement I’ve seen over and over on these forums and elsewhere are proposals for “easy” fixes and overarching assumptions about how long implementation for a variety of changes “should” take.

The reality is, game development is a hugely iterative and time-consuming process, with many people involved along the way. Design takes time, Coding takes time, art takes time, QA takes time: you name it. There are also multiple steps in the pipeline for each and every proposed change and bug fix, no matter how minor, and what issues are being worked on in what order and by who can and do change as new matters arise. Sometimes extra testing is also needed for bugs that come back broken and need to be retested, because we didn't want them to go live with a bad fix.

While there may indeed be a list of known issues and bugs that run alongside some patches, for every one you are aware of, there can be dozens or hundreds being worked on behind-the-scenes that you likely never be aware of. We do things just as quickly as we can, but even then, it’s a process that takes time.

i disagree with some statements above

i am hobbyist game-developer and modder myself for many years, and a real life a participant in several multi-million dollar projects - not in gaming industry, but well-executed projects are far more similar in nature than one would expect:

so:- programming, graphical design and design do indeed take substantial testing- some fixes don't need nearly as much time and testing as presented, and often those are ones that bother players the most

example is balancing - pure number changing - and pre-patch 1.07

after game is over 8 months on market, there are number of ~300% skill runes buff. any serious analysis would discover them far faster - fact is they would never leave closed-beta. 20% buff/nerf is considered a substantial, and 100% nearly unacceptable in late game phase (granted, there are some rule-breaking exceptions)

that apart, mentioned 300% buffs may be indeed needed, and, since they are so big changes, need extensive testing, there is still one question - why it wasn't done partially, in 20-50% increments, over last 4-5 balance patches?

for a game in current state of balance, a monthly plan of balance-patches is appropriate (excluding coding, art and such, which follows "upon finishing testing" application).

by looking at publicly available data:http://diablo.somepage.com/monk/rune/

[without doubt, Blizzard has far more accurate and valuable ones]

one concludes that over 1/3 runes are basically unused (on monk example, since monk balancing is major part of 1.07, so far at least)

this is far from acceptable, both to players who expected more diversity, and to company who invested money in developing unusable resources (and engaged whole pipeline and hundred of people behind the scene mentioned above)

for the record, i did apply (few days ago) for a dev team member, chiefly for a reason to be taken more seriously - the thing impossible using forums

i also offered to make (free of charge) detailed analysis and propose simple and easy solutions for most pressing matters

yes, everyone and their brothers thinks they can do that, but i have a work resume proving i know what i'm talking about

[i am a guy with more than 10 years of experience in multi-million dollars projects (mentioned already), with dozens-or-even-hundreds subordinates and working for a large international company with thousands of employees. my job is to find bottlenecks and weak points of processes/system and propose best and most efficient solutions. i charge substantial money for it, or get it as a bonus.

however, for me not everything is in money, diablo-series is my, so to speak, friend - so, i'm offering to do my well-paid job for you for free, out of enthusiasm. gaming is my hobby, and i don't mind spending my free time making it better. i think i deserve a chance - and some kind of reasonable guarantee that my professional report will be at least read, and not thrown into 'remove AH' recycle bin.

all the information given in resume are checkable.

my general professional advice is to take 3rd party opinion (regardless of who is in question) on current game status and future - game currently functions well enough, but has no 10-year life-cycle capability. of course, life cycle could be less, if next installment is planned earlier, but in current roadmap it is not the case]